Undercover Cops SFC prototype

[trevormacro | 2]

Hello,

Anybody know if this cart is a beta prototype or not?

According to gamefaqs the game was released on 03/03/95 in Jap.

On this cart i see 8/23 mean what? 23 august what year?

[CMR | 521]

I would say it's definitely a possibility since production carts didn't come with eproms, and that has eprom silkscreened onto the board.

[Tanooki | 4,946]

I'd lean strongly towards legit prototype, or minimally speaking the board and chips are right.  I've seen that before decades ago, it's a Nintendo board used to test code when it's far enough long to take the time to burn it to chips (multiple copies) for a test room to take a crack at to look for issues or test new stuff added to the exist fragments of the game coming together.  The year wouldn't matter on this, that's why it says 8/23, so you'd probably have to assume the year it came out is the year there and yeah the rest is the actual date someone inked that once flashing the chips and attaching them to that board.

Wikipedia lists this as a JP only release March 3 1995 which likely explains why it wasn't localized as it looks like it should.  My guess, it was under development by their US branch or whoever IREM would have shoveled this off onto to that, but by the time August 1995 rolled around with the Nintendo 64 SUPPOSEDLY out that year months later, they canned it not wanting to put up the expense of a game post-new console launch.

If you check again the WIKI, this is and I could verify it(have the issue) in Nintendo Power #58 as an upcoming release, so that there I'm with 99% certainty probably is the final/near final release of the game with english added into it and never released (since the JP release was out way back in 1992.)

Damn shame, but a hell of an opportunity if this is something new and not dumped.  Is it?

 

Same sad victimization even Nintendo's own Star Fox 2 suffered since SF64+N64 would have popped up a year about earlier.

[Code Monkey | 2,011]

The Nintendo chip on the board is marked 9317 which is the 17th week of 1993 but I don't know any way to tell when this build was made.

[CD2193 | 0]

Undercover Cops SFC was actually intended to be released in late 1993 by irem themselves, without any involvement from Varie (the eventual publisher). You can still find old promo material from irem promoting the game's intended original release.

For whatever reason, they shelved the title and it didn't see a retail release until 1995, after Varie picked it up and slapped their name on it, and maybe finished up whatever irem hadn't.

Note that no parts on this PCB are dated after 1993.